Haredi fertility is about 6.6 in America and about 6.5 in Israel, so a family that makes aliyah carries its family size across intact and changes everything about how the state pays for it. We built one family, six children aged 1 to 14, and moved it between two systems. At $60,000 a year in New York it collects $29,081. In Israel it collects $7,670. Almost none of the difference is child benefit.
A family with six children earning $60,000 in New York collects $11,465 of America's $13,200 Child Tax Credit, and $1,734 of Israel's much larger child tax credits. Add the rest of what each state pays and New York is ahead by nearly four to one.
The story everyone tells is that Israel pays a universal allowance and America pays a conditional credit. Every clause is true, and the conclusion usually drawn from it is not.
Israel runs both architectures at once. Underneath sits a cash allowance that arrives whatever a family earns. On top sit tax credit points worth far more, useless to any household below the tax threshold. America's credit behaves the same way at the bottom.
The money is somewhere else entirely. Food stamps, Medicaid, and, for a family with a disabled child, a monthly cash payment larger than anything in either tax code. On that last one the two countries pay almost the same amount, and only one of them stops when you earn.
One thing this piece does not do is price what a family spends. Housing, tuition, food and health costs are the other half of the ledger and they are the subject of the next piece in this series.
In the child credit, a fourth, fifth and sixth child are worth nothing to a poor American family. In disability benefits, those same five siblings are what keep the sixth child eligible.
What does each country pay a family for its sixth child?
The chart below has two bars at every position along the bottom, one for each child in birth order. The blue bar is what America's Child Tax Credit is worth per child before any test is applied: a flat $2,200, the same for the first child and the eighth. The amber bar is what Israel's monthly child allowance actually pays for that child over a year, converted at 2.99 shekels to the dollar.
Notice that the amber bars go up and then come back down.
Israel's allowance once rose steeply with birth order. The National Insurance Institute's own research volume records a family with seven children drawing 3,558 shekels a month at the end of 2000, with the seventh child alone worth 666. The 2003 cuts applied by a child's date of birth rather than by family, so siblings born months apart either side of 1 June 2003 drew different allowances for eighteen years. The 2013 Arrangements Law finished the flattening, and the 2015 restoration bought back only children two through four. Today's hump is that compromise, indexed forward eleven years.
Why does a family with six children receive the same credit as a family with three?
America's refundable credit is 15 percent of a household's earnings above $2,500, applied once to the household and then capped at $1,700 per child. Below the point where that cap binds, the number of children never enters the calculation. A family with three children earning $30,000 and a family with six children earning $30,000 both receive $4,125. The Earned Income Tax Credit stops counting at three children, so it adds nothing either.
The blue line below is what a six-child family actually receives as earnings rise. The dashed line across the top is the $13,200 the credit is nominally worth to it. The shaded area between them is the part it does not get, and it closes only at $66,426.
Watch how far along the bottom axis the line has to travel before it touches the dashed one.
The fourth, fifth and sixth children of the family at Case 1 are each worth exactly zero dollars in this credit. Hold that fact. It reverses later, in the one place where America pays a large family the most.
Israel pays every family something. Who does it pay properly?
The child allowance is 1,176 shekels a month for six children: 173 for the first, 219 each for the second through fourth, 173 each for the fifth and sixth. No income test, no asset test, no work requirement. It is not taxable, it is paid to the mother by default into an account in her name, it arrives on the twentieth, and nobody applies for it.
Then there are tax credit points, נקודות זיכוי (nekudot zikuy, credits against tax owed). One point erases 2,904 shekels of tax in 2026. After the 2022 and 2024 expansions, six children aged 1 to 14 give their parents 30 points between them, 87,120 shekels of relief capacity. A family only receives the smaller of that capacity and its actual tax bill, so at $32,000 it receives none of it. The points attach to a parent and cannot be moved to a spouse.
| Earnings split | $32,000 | $60,000 | $120,000 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Two earners, 60/40 | $0 | $1,734 | $12,064 |
| Two earners, 80/20 | $378 | $3,875 | $13,094 |
| One earner only | $1,174 | $6,275 | $13,094 |
Read down any column and the number rises as the household concentrates its income, because points are wasted against a second salary too small to generate tax. Read across the bottom row and it stops at $13,094, because a father working alone can only ever use his own 13.5 points. The mother holds the larger share, 16.5, and in a single-earner household that half expires unused every year.
Put the two tax codes next to each other. Who is ahead, and where?
Three cases, matched in dollars. Case 1 at $32,000 is a kollel household in Israel and roughly the median household in New Square, New York. Case 2 at $60,000 is the average Israeli Haredi household and roughly the median in Kiryas Joel. Case 3 is two professional earners in either country.
| Case 1 $32,000 | Case 2 $60,000 | Case 3 $120,000 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Federal Child Tax Credit | $4,425 | $11,465 | $13,200 |
| of a maximum of | $13,200 | $13,200 | $13,200 |
| Federal EITC | $8,054 | $2,157 | $0 |
| New York child credit | $4,000 | $4,000 | $3,835 |
| New York EITC | $2,416 | $647 | $0 |
| American total | $18,895 | $18,269 | $17,035 |
| Israeli child allowance | $4,713 | $4,713 | $4,713 |
| Israeli credit points used | $0 | $1,734 | $12,064 |
| Israeli work grant, estimate | $2,200 | $1,223 | $0 |
| Israeli total | $6,913 | $7,670 | $16,778 |
The chart below draws those two totals across the whole income range instead of at three points. The blue line is New York, the amber line is Israel, and the small circle is where they cross.
So where is the rest of the American money coming from?
Everything so far has come out of a tax return. Now add what does not. Both bars below are the same family, six children, $60,000 of earnings. The top bar is New York and the bottom bar is Israel, and each is cut into segments by where the money comes from. The blues are federal and state tax credits. The green segment is food stamps. The ambers are the Israeli allowance, credit points and work grant.
Look at the green segment, and then at how far short the whole Israeli bar falls.
Food stamps come with a catch the tax credits do not have. Every extra $10,000 this family earns costs it $2,400 of SNAP, because 80 percent of earnings count and benefits fall by 30 cents on each counted dollar. It is a 24 percent tax nobody calls a tax, and it lands on exactly the earnings range where the Child Tax Credit is still phasing in.
Alongside sit WIC for the three children under five, universal school meals, heating assistance, child care subsidy and housing vouchers. Israel's side is thinner but not empty: free education from age three, income-tested daycare subsidies conditioned on the mother working, and municipal tax discounts that matter in Beitar Illit and Modi’in Illit. Adding all of it widens the gap rather than closing it.
Where does America pay the most for a child, and what is the same child worth in Israel?
Supplemental Security Income pays a disabled child $994 a month in federal benefit plus a $23 New York supplement, $12,204 a year in cash. Whether a family qualifies depends on how much of the parents' income is counted as the child's, and the rule for that is where this essay turns over.
Before any parental income is counted, the Social Security Administration sets aside an allowance for every other child in the household. In 2026 that allowance is $497 a month each. This family has five other children, so $2,485 a month comes off the top before the calculation begins.
The chart below draws two lines against the number of children a family has. The blue line is what a family must earn to collect the full Child Tax Credit. The green line is the earnings at which the disabled child loses SSI entirely. The dashed line across the middle is this family, at $60,000.
Both lines rise with each child. Notice that they mean opposite things.
Israel pays for the same child too, and pays more. The disabled child allowance has five tiers and no income test whatever.
| Monthly | Annual | Income tested? | |
|---|---|---|---|
| New York, SSI plus state supplement | $1,017 | $12,204 | yes, gone by $90,960 |
| Israel, 50 percent tier | $649 | $7,788 | no |
| Israel, 100 percent tier | $1,276 | $15,311 | no |
| Israel, 112 percent tier | $1,503 | $18,040 | no |
| Israel, 188 percent tier | $2,398 | $28,782 | no |
| Israel, 235 percent tier | $3,048 | $36,577 | no |
| for comparison, Israel’s allowance for all six children | $393 | $4,713 | no |
Read the last row against the one in bold. One autistic child is worth 3.2 times what Israel pays for all six children put together. Israel also raises each child's allowance by half again when a household has two or more disabled children, which is the same logic America applies through the sibling allowance, arriving from the opposite direction.
A caution before this becomes a claim about anybody. Nothing here says how many Haredi children are disabled, in either country. Israel diagnoses autism in 1.8 percent of children against 2.8 percent in the United States, and roughly a third of Israel's disabled child allowance now goes to autism, a caseload that has grown about fivefold in a decade. Neither country publishes any of it by religion.
If the cash is roughly equal, what about the services?
Here the two countries stop being comparable, and the reason is worth stating rather than smoothing over.
New York pays for special education services delivered to children who attend private religious schools. A speech, occupational or physical therapy session runs the city $54 per half hour on a voucher a parent can take to an independent provider, a rate that sat at $45 and unchanged for more than twenty years before the recent correction. When no provider accepts the voucher, the unmet mandate becomes a legal claim. In one year New York City alone generated 14,618 of the 22,759 special education due process claims filed in the entire United States, and it paid out roughly $1.3 billion in settlements in 2024-25, at an average of $101,757 per student against city per-pupil spending of $32,284.
The Kiryas Joel Village Union Free School District is the clearest single illustration. It enrolls 176 children, almost all of them from the village's private yeshivas, and spends $215,111 per pupil, the highest figure in New York State. About 9,838 of the village's roughly 10,000 school-age children attend private schools, and the district says 45 percent of its public budget supports them.
One correction to the obvious reading. Chalkbeat found that 71 percent of students receiving tuition payments through those settlements are white, in a city where white students are 12.5 percent of all students with disabilities, and the tuition cases centre on Manhattan private schools. The Hasidic Brooklyn story sits in services billing, not tuition reimbursement. They are two different stories and conflating them is the error most available here.
Israel funds the same child inside the same kind of school, and the law turns out to be clearer than the reporting on it. The Special Education Law is built on the phrase מוסד חינוך מוכר (mosad chinuch mukar, recognised educational institution), not on the narrower word for an official state school. A special education institution is defined in section 1 as a recognised institution in which special education services are provided, and since Amendment 11 the frameworks a parent may choose among include exactly that. A Haredi recognised-but-unofficial school is a recognised institution. The child in it is entitled to free special education services, and section 4 puts the responsibility on the state.
Two things sit underneath that sentence.
An exempt institution is a different legal category. It holds an exemption from compulsory education, it is listed separately from recognised institutions throughout the regulations, and to keep that status it must teach at least 55 percent of the secular core curriculum, five days a week, 180 days a year. It is not a recognised institution, so the entitlement does not attach the same way. In the Hasidic boys’ institutions where exempt status is most common, that is the line the money stops at.
Israel also caps the whole thing in advance. Section 7(e) has the Education Minister, together with the Finance Minister, set an annual budget for expanding the number of children found eligible, and then tell each eligibility committee how many new children it may approve that year, under rules ensuring the total cost does not exceed that budget.
That is the difference, and it is not generosity. America’s special education entitlement is individually enforceable and uncapped, so when a service is not delivered a parent files, and eventually the city writes a cheque. Israel’s entitlement is free, statutory and rationed by a committee working to a quota fixed before the school year starts. One design produces $1.3 billion of litigation. The other produces a queue.
The ordinary funding gap runs the same direction. A Haredi recognised-but-unofficial primary school outside the large networks drew 7,233 shekels per student in 2016-17, against 16,737 in an official Hebrew state school, about 43 agorot on the shekel.
So: six children, two systems. Which country actually pays for them?
New York, at every income a Haredi family is likely to have. At $60,000 it pays $29,081 against Israel's $7,670, and the child credit is the smaller half of that. In the New York area 53 percent of Haredi households are poor or near-poor, and about 80 percent of those contain someone who works, so this is the modal family rather than the edge case.
The two states are doing different things. Israel writes one small cheque that arrives on the twentieth of every month, to every family, without being asked for. America assembles a much larger sum out of a dozen programmes, each with its own form, its own income test, and its own annual re-proving, and then claws back 24 cents of it for every extra dollar the family earns.
The exception is the disabled child, where the two systems nearly meet: $12,204 in New York against $15,311 in Israel for a child with autism. Even there the shape differs. Israel pays it to anyone. America pays it only while the family stays under a ceiling, and the only reason this family clears that ceiling at all is that it has five other children.
None of which settles the question a family is actually asking. What a state pays is half a ledger. What things cost is the other half, and that is the next piece.
Every figure here is money coming in. Nothing here prices rent, tuition, food, transport or health costs, and those differ enormously between Kiryas Joel and Beitar Illit. A family choosing between the two countries needs both halves. This essay is the first half, and the second is the next piece in the series.
New York runs one of the most generous state packages in the country and accepts an ITIN where the federal credit now demands a Social Security number for the parent as well as the child. A Lakewood family in New Jersey claims only its three children aged five and under for the state child credit and collects about $3,000 against New York's $4,000. A family in a state with no refundable child credit loses the bottom half of the American tax column entirely. Food stamps and Medicaid are federal and travel better.
All conversions use 2.9940 shekels to the dollar. Israeli prices run high relative to that rate, so a shekel buys less at home than the conversion implies. The most recent verifiable World Bank purchasing power factor for Israel is 3.79, from 2021, too old to apply to 2026 without a refresh. On that basis every Israeli figure here would fall by roughly a quarter, which widens the gap rather than narrowing it.
The food stamp figure assumes $2,600 a month in rent and utilities for a household of eight, enough to make the shelter deduction cap bind; at lower shelter costs the benefit falls. The Israeli work grant profile is interpolated from a published eligibility band, and a kollel stipend is not taxable employment income, so the Case 1 household may claim one grant rather than two. Medicaid and Israeli national health cover are not priced at all, on either side.
Neither Bituach Leumi nor Kol Zchut states plainly whether a family receiving the disabled child allowance also keeps the ordinary child allowance for that child. The two are separate chapters of the National Insurance Law and almost certainly both apply, but because we could not confirm it the disabled child figures are shown on their own and are never added into a household total.
The 87,120 shekel figure is the tax a family could shelter, not a payment anyone receives. What arrives is the smaller of that capacity and the household's actual bill: nothing at Case 1, $1,734 at Case 2, $12,064 at Case 3. Treating capacity as a transfer would overstate Israel's generosity by a factor of five at the bottom of the distribution.
Section 07 reads the Special Education Law as published: the entitlement is built on "recognised educational institution", which as a matter of definition includes a recognised-but-unofficial school, and exempt institutions sit outside that definition. What we could not establish is how much of that entitlement is actually delivered inside Haredi schools, how long the queues run, or how the eligibility quota in section 7(e) is distributed between sectors. The Ministry of Education publishes no breakdown of special education provision by supervision stream that we could reach. The legal position is documented; the practice is not.
The 6.6 comes from Lyman Stone in Demographic Research, using American Community Survey data from 2000 to 2021 and identifying households by whether they speak Yiddish. That proxy weights toward Hasidic families and undercounts the English-speaking Yeshivish households of Lakewood, Baltimore and Monsey. Israel's 6.5 is firmer, and it is falling: 7.5 twenty years ago, with the Taub Center projecting completed fertility near 4.3 by the end of the 2030s.
No Haredi-specific estimate of Child Tax Credit or SSI take-up has ever been published, in either country. Neither state records religion. Federal SSI statistics stop at the county, so Kiryas Joel, New Square and Borough Park cannot be isolated from them, and the raw county counts for Rockland and Orange do not by themselves support any claim about Haredi take-up. Every figure in this essay is a statutory calculation for a stylised household, not a measurement of what any real family received.
Ḥeshbon
A data project on how Jewish life is paid for, published in full. Every figure comes from the underlying research, and where a chart simplifies a published result the piece says so.
Each piece here is published, with its own sources, sample sizes and limits stated in place. Percentages describe the samples observed, and several rest on small denominators, noted where they appear. Nothing here audits an individual institution. Aliyah figures are current as of August 2026, at roughly three shekels to the dollar, and Israeli tax and benefit rules move faster than that.